“O.K. Only what’ll I do?”

“Everything. Specialization is gone; too few surviving specialists and equipment. I think your chief task will be to head the census bureau.”

“Eh?”

Robinson grinned lopsidedly. “You’ll be the census bureau, except for what few assistants I can spare you.” He leaned forward, said earnestly: “And it’s one of the most important jobs there is. You’ll do for this country what you did for central Eurasia, only in much greater detail. Drummond, we have to know.”

He took a map from a desk drawer and spread it out. “Look, here’s the United States. I’ve marked regions known to be uninhabitable in red.” His fingers traced out the ugly splotches. “Too many of ’em, and doubtless there are others we haven’t found yet. Now, the blue X’s are army posts.” They were sparsely scattered over the land, near the centers of population groupings. “Not enough of those. It’s all we can do to control the more or less well-off, orderly people. Bandits, enemy troops, homeless refugees—they’re still running wild, skulking in the backwoods and barrens, and raiding whenever they can. And they spread the plague. We won’t really have it licked till everybody’s settled down, and that’d be hard to enforce. Drummond, we don’t even have enough soldiers to start a feudal system for protection. The plague spread like a prairie fire in those concentrations of men.

“We have to know. We have to know how many people survived—half the population, a third, a quarter, whatever it is. We have to know where they are, and how they’re fixed for supplies, so we can start up an equitable distribution system. We have to find all the small-town shops and labs and libraries still standing, and rescue their priceless contents before looters or the weather beat us to it. We have to locate doctors and engineers and other professional men, and put them to work rebuilding. We have to find the outlaws and round them up. We—I could go on forever. Once we have all that information, we can set up a master plan for redistributing population, agriculture, industry, and the rest most efficiently, for getting the country back under civil authority and police, for opening regular transportation and communication channels—for getting the nation back on its feet.”

“I see,” nodded Drummond. “Hitherto, just surviving and hanging on to what was left has taken precedence. Now you’re in a position to start expanding, if you know where and how much to expand.”

“Exactly.” Robinson rolled a cigarette, grimacing. “Not much tobacco left. What I have is perfectly foul. Lord, that war was crazy!”

“All wars are,” said Drummond dispassionately, “but technology advanced to the point of giving us a knife to cut our throats with. Before that, we were just beating our heads against the wall. Robinson, we can’t go back to the old ways. We’ve got to start on a new track—a track of sanity.”

“Yes. And that brings up—” The other man looked toward the kitchen door. They could hear the cheerful rattle of dishes there, and smell mouth-watering cooking odors. He lowered his voice. “I might as well tell you this now, but don’t let Elaine know. She…she shouldn’t be worried. Drummond, did you see our horses?”